Southampton transfer blunder will haunt Burnley FC forever

Not a single person with ties to Burnley would ever have a bad word to say about Nathan Tella, but the fact he never returned to Turf Moor on a permanent basis is something which will haunt fans forever.

Tella made the switch to East Lancashire in the summer of 2022, one a raft of players Vincent Kompany recruited to aid their push to return to the Premier League and he endured a season beyond anyone’s wildest expectations.

When he was signed, most Burnley fans knew precious little about him, besides the fact he was deemed surplus to requirements by Southampton, which didn’t particularly bode well.

But one thing Clarets fans learned very quickly was that you should never doubt Kompany’s eye for talent, and after hitting the ground running, Tella kept up his scintillating form throughout the season and earned a spot in the PFA Championship Team of the Season for 22/23.

“Sign him on” was the chant of choice by Burnley fans as the season drew to a close, and there was osome cautious optimism over the summer that at some point Tella would return.

Burnley made a huge blunder in the initial loan move

Perhaps owing to the fact Tella was a bit of an unknown quantity, with lots still to prove in the game, when he signed for Burnley, his Turf Moor switch was just a straight loan deal, with no option to make the move permanent in the summer.

Even promotion dependant, Burnley had no option to bring their star attacker back to Turf Moor, which opened up the door to other potential suitors in the summer.

The Clarets did try to bring Tella back to the club, but their £9m offer fell considerably short of what Southampton were asking for, although at that point, there was still hope a resolution could be found.

That hope was soon extinguished when it transpired Tella was moving to German club Bayer Leverkusen for a fee around £20m, which was a crushing blow for Burnley.

It’s something the club will be acutely aware could’ve been avoided had they inserted a clause into the initial deal, but even so, some cynics would argue that they should’ve stumped up the £20m for Tella rather than the similar amount they spent on Zeki Amdouni in the same summer.

Failure to secure loan players contributed to Burnley losing their Premier League status

While it would be unfair, and untrue, to suggest that failing to sign Tella alone was the reason why Burnley made an instant return to the Championship, it was certainly a contributing factor.

His electric pace and movement in behind helped open up spaces for the likes of Manuel Benson and Anass Zaroury in their Championship season, but once that movement stopped in the top-flight with Amdouni preferring to drop deep, the whole pitch closed up.

Burnley struggled to play the expansive game they wanted to, and at times they had to over play because they had no out-ball up front.

Alongside missing out on Tella, fellow loan stars Taylor Harwood-Bellis and Ian Maatsen both slipped through the club’s fingers, and because of that, Burnley had to replace them all with new players who didn’t know the system.

That obviously takes time playing the way Kompany did, and ultimately it just took too long for Burnley last season.

Seeing Tella succeed the way he is at Leverkusen now though – poetically scoring a winning goal to knock Kompany’s Bayern Munich out of the DFB-Pokal recently – he’ll be the loanee who the Clarets board look at with huge regrets.

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